


Put on Your Best, Boy [and I'll wear my pearls]

by Nerissa



Category: Not If I Save You First - Ally Carter
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, Formal wear with modifications, Heart-to-Heart, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 21:00:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17149010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: After the wind and the wild and the woods they land together in a new kind of wilderness.Maddie adjusts in her own way.





	Put on Your Best, Boy [and I'll wear my pearls]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrikate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrikate/gifts).



Dear Logan,

Did you know you’re not allowed to bring a hatchet to a State Dinner? Something to do with security risks, and my father having his reputation to maintain. Which I am pretty sure is code for ‘don’t embarrass me’ even though he says I never could.

We know that’s a lie, of course. I easily could. But it won’t be by bringing a hatchet, I guess.

I’m wearing a dress instead.

Love,

Maddie

 

* * *

 

Maddie,

You know I’m only next door, right?

You could just come over instead of e-mailing me.

Also, texting is honestly a lot faster. Please try?

Logan

 

* * *

 

Maddie fidgeted with the skirt of her very fancy, definitely-would-not-pair-well-with-a-hatchet ball gown as she waited for Logan to answer her knock on his door. She could have chatted with the agent who stood in the hall, but he was new to her, and she didn’t feel like making small talk when she was already feeling so small herself.

Her dress was beautiful. It should have made her night. It was a full-length fairy tale princess creation, all shimmery blue green silk buoyed up and out all through the skirts with carefully-placed layers of tulle, and she loved it, she really did.

But she did not love what it was missing.

She did not love how much it forced her to give up, just to put it on.

She hated how she could wear this many layers of fabric and still feel naked.

Before she was forced to explore that thought any further, the door finally swung in, belatedly responsive to her knock, and Logan stood there.

He still managed to sometimes surprise her with how tall he was, even though she’d seen him nearly every day for a month now, both at school and, occasionally, on weekends at her home and his. Today he looked even taller, his dark formalwear almost completely assembled into something like the way she knew it should look, except for the way the shirt collar hung crookedly open and he held a short length of black fabric in one hand.

“Are you planning to blindfold somebody?” she wondered.

He blinked rapidly, startled into silence.

“Me?” she suggested, and was pleased to see his cheeks flame scarlet before she rocked back on her heels and nodded at the man to her left. “Or, him? Because if it’s him, I think that’s probably some kind of labor code violation.”

“It’s not a blindfold,” Logan finally managed to interrupt the nervous stream of her narrative. “It’s a bow tie.” He held it up, awkward, dangling off the tip of his finger. “At least, it will be. If I can get it tied.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you say so?” She plucked it from his hand as though he had been making a gift to her, and fluttered it airily under the nose of the agent at the door. “I promise not to violate any particular part of him, but I really need to help him with this. I know fashion emergencies.”

Before the agent could be provoked into making any comment, she had pushed Logan bodily back into the room and banged the door shut behind them.

On the other side of the door, she exhaled. It was a small thing, or should have been, but to the boy who’d made a kind of study of all the small things that made up one of the biggest parts of his life, it stood out.

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head, not entirely trusting herself with the answer, and made a quick gesture at him to bend down to her level.

Logan frowned, but did as she wanted, which showed he had learned a thing or two in Alaska himself. Maddie had to smile to herself as she threaded the bow tie around the back of his neck and made one, two, three failed efforts to force it into the necessary shape before she flung up her arms, stepped back and said,

“All right, this thing is possessed. Where’s the Internet? I need videos.”

Which was how she came to be poking her way around Logan’s phone in search of bow tie guidance while he tried, carefully, to repeat his previous question in softer terms.

“Is something . . . look, Maddie, I just wanted to ask if—”

“Nothing’s wrong.” She did not look up from the phone as she said it, but something in the set of her shoulders kept his attention very closely on her indeed as she studied one of her search results with exaggerated care. “I mean, why would it be? We’re here, together, there’s this . . . whatever this is, tonight, State Dinner thing, and your parents actually invited me and your mother helped me pick out this dress because she’s basically the best person _ever_ and I should feel like Cinderella, right?”

Her voice and hands trembled at almost the exactly same moment.

“I should feel like freaking Cinderella, so why do I mostly just want to run away?”

She still wouldn’t look at him, but he moved a little closer, slowly, like he was trying not to spook her.

“Well,” he said, after a long pause, “Cinderella did actually run away and hide for part of the story, right?”

She laughed at that, surprising them both.

“It’s a fairy tale, Logan,” she sighed, but she didn’t sound so wobbly anymore. “And this is Washington. It might be cloud and cuckoo land a lot of the time, but I think it’s still technically real life.”

“Only technically,” Logan muttered, then mustered a reassuring smile. “Look, I don’t want to keep asking if you don’t want to talk about it, but . . . do you? I mean, is it just the hatchet, or is it more than that? Because if it’s just the hatchet, I actually—”

“No,” Maddie shook her head, swiping through to another video. “It’s not the hatchet. I mean, it is, but mostly it’s just all _this_.” She swung his phone around expressively at the room, the window, and the world beyond it. “Do you know I am actually taking a math test tomorrow?”

“Yeah, we’re both in the same class.”

She shook her head, patient with his oblivion to her point.

“But Logan, it’s _math_. And last month we almost died. A lot.”

This point, Logan was fully ready to concede.

“Yeah I think we probably shared a small town’s statistical worth of near-death experiences, no question.”

“So how do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Math. And Geography and Chemistry and walking through the hall smiling at people and leaving food on your plate without worrying about it and signing up for the _yearbook committee_?”

Logan shrugged.

“They asked me to join, and I’m good with graphic design, so . . .”

Maddie’s answering expression told him, belatedly, that he had not been meant to actually explain his rationale for joining the yearbook committee.

“It’s not the details, Logan, it’s all of it. The way you can walk around like it’s all normal. How do you do that?”

He wanted to tell her that he did it because it all _was_ normal, but he couldn’t do that. Not to Maddie. He owed her honesty, at the very least, so that’s what he gave her.

“I just figure if I fake it long enough, eventually it will start to feel like less of a lie and more of the truth.”

She sat frozen a long moment, then slumped over his phone in boneless, transparent relief.

“Oh thank goodness,” she mumbled, “I was so afraid that you actually just . . . meant it. That life was really all ordinary for you again, and you didn’t have the dreams, and wake up thinking you were still . . .”

“Back there?”

She nodded, and lifted her gaze from the phone once more to find him staring at her with an intensity that surpassed any of their shared experiences to date. She caught her breath.

“Logan . . .”

He lifted her, gently, to her feet. Pulled her, not at all gently, against him, and hugged her til she thought she heard her own bones creak.

“Ow.”

“Sorry.” He let her go immediately and stepped back, chagrined. “But listen, it isn’t . . . it won’t always be this bad. We’ll live it, see? We’ll act like it’s normal, and then eventually, it just will be.”

“How can you be so sure of it, though?”

Logan thought of the long corridor that he finally only remembered when he chose to.

“Because I had to do it before. We both did, right?”

She nodded. Right. They both did. And she could do it again, surely. Could walk down streets snarled with honking, roaring vehicles and breathe in the dirty black exhaust they spewed. Could navigate the wilderness of her high school hallways, write tests so far removed from the world they were meant to prepare her for that she found it difficult, some days, not to break into nervous laughter at the disparity.

She could do this.

She had to.

“Here,” she heard herself say, tapping pause on the latest video, “hold still, I think this one is it.”

He let her return to the bow tie, and this time it took only two tries to tame it into something resembling the correct shape. She patted it proudly, unreasonably pleased with her own accomplishment.

“There. Care to walk a girl downstairs? I think we’re both ready.”

But instead of taking the hand she held out, he backed away, looking distracted. Turned to fumble around the upper half of his disaster area of an unmade bed, and produce a confusing-looking mess of leatherwork.

“I almost forgot. I made it for you. After your e-mail.”

She stared, uncomprehending, at the leather straps Logan was holding out to her. It looked like a pair of belts, almost, but the size was off, and she really didn’t see . . .

“It’s a holster, see?” He adjusted the hang of it slightly, poking one finger through the reduced circumference of the smallest loop. “For your hatchet. If you wanted to carry it in with you. I think it will go under the top layer of your skirt. If . . . if you like.”

Maddie found she didn’t quite have the words to express herself, but she hoped the width and warmth of her smile adequately conveyed the fact that yes, she did like. She liked very much, indeed.

A careful adjustment of the necessary skirt was made, and the belt and holster settled neatly under its drape. She resisted the urge to twirl.

“Okay,” she declared, hooking her hand through his elbow, “new plan. First we stop at my room to pick up the hatchet I packed _just_ in case, and _then_ we go downstairs.”

She led the way to the door with such renewed vigor that even the agent whose name she did not know betrayed some surprise at the sight of them entering the corridor. When she emerged, moments later, from her own guest room and settled the skirt of her dress even more decidedly about her, he seemed emboldened to speak.

“Feeling better, Miss Manchester?” he wondered, and she spared an especially sunny smile just for him.

“Oodles. But then,” she flicked the hem of her skirt thoughtfully, “I find that’s always the way, once you add the right accessories.”

The agent missed the wink she gave immediately after, but no matter.

Logan was pretty sure that was just for him.

**Author's Note:**

> Love this canon and loved your request for it! I hope Maddie's own brand of ordinary rings true. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
